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Blacklaw writes "A team of researchers comprised of members from the Semiconductor Research Corporation and Stanford University has developed a new thermal nanotape which it claims will lead to chips that run cooler and last longer. The thermal nanotape, constructed of binder materials surrounding carbon nanotubes, promises to lead to the creation of semiconductors — including CPUs and GPUs — that don't suffer from the rigors of frequent temperature changes, known as thermal cycling."

I always jump to that bit from Alien where the blood is eating through the decks and the Commander ruins someone's pen examining the stuff and says "molecular acid". You would think with those budgets they could get a natural sciences student to read through the scripts or something? Don't get me started on the "unobtanium" from Avatar.

Yes, I like that page and I usually forget that "i" when typing fast too. Got to use a bunch of those terms and (I think) a few of my own when I did my Avatar review last year.Writing of the aircraft in the movie:

Unless they are made of ‘upsidasium’ they must be fueled by ‘undepletium’ because they are always fully loaded and hovering.

But the exhaust ports, exhaust and staining on the atmospheric craft suggest plain old carbon based fuels. When the folks mentioned in my review started going through how that stuff works now, we came to the conclusion that they just stuck turbine engines to generators and ran wires to the ceramic/unobtainium motors driving the blades.

Well, you need reaction mass anyway in the shuttle. Which would be likely very superheated / might explain staining similar to when using hydrocarbons.

Atmospheric turbines would most likely superheat the flowing air too (there would be surely plenty of waste heat / cooling required, whatever powers the turbines) - even if both in & out would be only air, just slightly organic (burned to soot while passing the turbine) haze ought to leave its mark after a while. Also: partial breakup of compounds forming

The main problem with CNT is the health concerns. Because it's such a new material, nobody really knows what will happen if it gets released into the environment. It's already widely accepted that they might be carcinogenic if inhaled, but obviously nobody wants to do studies. Most of these projects fall down at the H&S hurdle.

I recall some obscure articles and google ads about CNT products for sale. Unless you're a material engineer doing something very obscure work you're unlikely to have a use for it though.
It's is simply a very niched market right now, the average user is unlikely to know of it until they can buy a neight indestructible tee(with some absurd caption about indestructibility that will get them in trouble).

Note that fullerenes form in natural soot. So its unlikely a typical fullerene is super dangerous.

One huge problem is fullerenes are a class of material, not one individual atom (err, well, they're mostly C) or molecule. You know how pissed off chemists were about that superman movie where he dissolved a computer using "acid" so a generation of the clueless masses grew up thinking there is an element or something called "acid" and all acids including citric will instantly vaporize steel, fiberglass, and silicon? Well the nano guys get that way about fullerenes and cancer. Could you theoretically micromachine a nanotube that is the exact same size and shape as an asbestos fiber and then inhale a bunch of them and die? Well, yeah if you intentionally tried really freaking hard, but why would you do something that stupid?

Kind of like blaming that new-fangled "metal" technology because people get hurt when tiny chemically propelled chunks of "metal" strike them in their heart, or when you make a hundred pound pile of U235 bad stuff happens, so I suggest we all live in fear of this "metal" technology and watch lots of scary TV.

Note that fullerenes form in natural soot. So its unlikely a typical fullerene is super dangerous.

The problem with this idea is that soot is a known carcinogen.

Many substances are known carcinogens, but how dangerous are they?

Asbestos is one substance that's a known carcinogen and is strictly controlled or outlawed in most countries, but it's not particularly dangerous unless one is constantly exposed to it in a workplace. Asbestos fibers occur naturally in the air and water, a normal adult has millions of asbestos fibers in the lungs.

Nanotubes resemble asbestos in some ways, so they probably have similar characteristics. They are probably mildly carcinogenic at c

That's pretty well-known, too. We don't just figure out they cause cancer and then decide we're done.

Asbestos is one substance that's a known carcinogen and is strictly controlled or outlawed in most countries, but it's not particularly dangerous unless one is constantly exposed to it in a workplace. Asbestos fibers occur naturally in the air and water, a normal adult has millions of asbestos fibers in the lungs.

But the mean size of processed asbestos particles is more dangerous.

Nanotubes resemble asbestos in some ways, so they probably have similar characteristics. They are probably mildly carcinogenic at continued exposures. However I don't think they will pose the same risk as asbestos did in the early 20th century because workplace conditions are much healthier these days. Besides, asbestos was mined, carbon nanotubes are fabricated. That makes a lot of difference in the relative air concentrations of each.

Not necessarily. It depends on the mining and containment techniques, and further, on what happens to them afterwards. It was not the practice to use Asbestos in conditions where it would be released into the atmosphere except in brake linings, for which we today have superior compounds (albeit not quite as inexpensive) and for which we trul

Asbestos is one substance that's a known carcinogen and is strictly controlled or outlawed in most countries, but it's not particularly dangerous unless one is constantly exposed to it in a workplace.

Asbestos includes several forms of fibrous mineral. Some are not particularly dangerous, some are very dangerous. It may take a long time for cancer and asbestos-related lung diseases to show up, but that doesn't mean no harm was done.

Asbestos fibers occur naturally in the air and water, a normal adult has millions of asbestos fibers in the lungs.

I'm willing to bet that the amount of asbestos in air, water, and especially the lungs of a normal adult from natural sources is an order of magnitude lower than the amount from mankind's activities.

Actually there are several problem with "Naked Nanotubes" that make them potentially very dangerous.

First because of their size, they can go virtually anywhere in a body and lodge virtually anyplace, messing with synaptic structures, metabolic processes, and potentially damaging cell machinery up to and including DNA/RNA. Second they are highly reactive chemically, and because all the interesting chemistry in a human being is organic (i.e. carbon based), nanotubes can and in fact do have significant impacts

The good news is if you bind one or both ends of the tube to a substrate it tends the stay put rather well

As long as the tube doesn't break, in which case you have new, non-bound, ends. I suppose any event that liberates particles of nanotubes from a larger substrate involve breaking things, so one can still see some problems here.

That's like saying metals are a health hazard because a guy used some metal to kill people in Arizona. C60, by far the most studied nanoparticle has been shown to be non-carcinogenic by itself although it does make a nice carrier for molecular oxygen for delivering a carcinogenic payload (ban oxygen!).

To me it just sounds like a replacement for colloidal silver paste: flexible but with a high thermal conductivity. I'm not poo-pooing the invention but what was wrong with paste, exactly? From what I read in TFA this just sounds like something else being hyped because CNTs are involved.

What's a good article to read about CPU longevity and running temperature? In my ignorance it seems like there's not much of a problem so long as nothing cracks as a result of differential expansion.

Try looking beyond your PC sometimes; integrated circuits will be sort of in everything, not a long time from now. Already there might be more ARM cores shipping annually than total number of x86 ones ever produced. And once good enough, they're supposed to last.

The thing from TFA seems more suited to automated mass production of embedded devices.

Gee, I wonder if there's some way a development enabling better thermal management and longevity / cycling (*) could be of any use to tightly miniaturized embedded stuff... (*)running typically in constant on/sleep way. Not nearly in everything, there's only ~3 times more ARM cores than people; only dozen around me.

The mental image of a chubby flight crew technician nano-duck-taping a Russian heavy lift vehicle to an American payload module, taping away in all his Mr. Fixit, butt-crack glory... has given my minds eye a need for psychological Visine... it burns, it burns!!! I think I'm going to have my brain washed out now. Ta

Is a nanotube technology the sucked the heat out of processors, and turned it back into electricity with a fairly high level of efficiency. Store that energy in high performance capacitors and you could cut the waste heat and electrical consumption of electronic devices by some huge amount. Imagine a laptop supercomputer running for months on a charge... of course there would be the energy lost from producing an illuminated display. We need hardware to interface our computers and visual cortices!!! imagine